CMS Plans Telehealth Demonstration

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced plans to conduct a home health pay-for-performance demonstration. The demonstration will operate for two years in seven states.

According to the CMS, system wide savings can be achieved when a home health agency prevents a re-hospitalization of the Medicare beneficiary or a further complication stemming from their illness, says the organization.

CMS contends seven quality measures from the existing Outcome-Based Quality Improvement (OBQI) set will be used to evaluate HHA performance so that HHAs will not have to submit additional data in order to participate.

The measures are:

· Incidence of Acute Care Hospitalization

· Incidence of Any Emergent Care

· Improvement in Bathing

· Improvement in Ambulation/Locomotion

· Improvement in Transferring

· Improvement in Status of Surgical Wounds

· Improvement in Management of Oral Medications